National identities are expressed in a variety of societal contexts. This study of nation building in modern Turkey focuses on the Friday sermons (hutbe), which, since the Republic (1923), have been viewed by the state as an avenue for engaging with the common people.

Sermons combine admonitions with various narratives, often alluding to long-standing religious traditions. Topics vary from religious and ethical issues to matters related to family, women, health; education; business, and environment. Even if politics, in the name of secularism, has been banned from mosques and sermons, questions of how to be a good citizen and honor the Turkish nation have been of utmost importance. Turkish society is ripe with tension and the specter of collapse, a legacy from the disruption of the Ottoman Empire, is insistent. Exhortations calling for social, political and national unity are therefore pervasive, but strategies and arguments differ both depending on the historical period and the discursive context of this particular form of religious oratory.

Main achievements of the study

• Presents a new field of research, which focuses the role of Islamic oratory in the nation-building process in modern Turkey.
• Analyses, within a chronological framework of modern Turkish history, various forms and contents of Friday prayer oratory.
• Highlights the difference between state patronage conducted through a secular political order (beginning of 1920s until the end of the 1990s) and a party-ruled system under Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) starting in 2002.
• Emphasizes the deep entrenchment on the collective consciousness of long-standing religious rituals (here the Friday hutbe) and how they are utilized and mobilized in the formation of modern political loyalties and national identities.
• Synthesizes three basic analytical dimensions of official Muslim oratory: the religious ritual; political and ideological discourses; and, governmental supervision through the official religious institution Diyanet.

The bulk of the study is made up of oratorical texts used during the Friday noon sermons (hutbe) in Turkey since the inauguration of the republic in 1923 until the end of the 2010s. Turkish authorities have strived to control the contents of the Friday sermons by discouraging sermonizing ex tempore. Instead they have imposed preaching based on written texts. The form of publication and distribution of the written texts have evolved concurrently with technical developments: first as books containing hutbe collections authorized by the governmental authorities; later as discourses appearing in official publications (weekly or monthly magazines); and, lastly, during the most recent couple of decades, as one-page texts circulated by fax or Internet. The official oratorical texts are enclosed by two institutions: the long-standing religious ritual, which is anchored in canonical law (sharia); and, a governmental institution of more recent date, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), the agency overlooking the distribution of officially acknowledged Friday sermons. This study thus embraces three dimensions of Friday sermonizing: hutbe texts from different periods and publishing contexts; the ritual, its historical origins and significance in lending authority to the oratorical exhortations and/or messages; and, Diyanet, the supervisory governmental institution, functioning as a sometimes more, sometimes less autonomous branch of the state.

Work has proceeded in five steps

Step 1 (fall 2014): Close/detailed reading of early Turkish hutbes, especially those published in an officially authorized two-volume hutbe collection from 1927 (extended and reprinted edition in 1936), resulting in a systematic classification of recurring topics and themes of the early, mid-war period.

Step 2 (spring 2015): Surveying of literature with special emphasis on that part of Muslim homiletics that in an Ottoman, but also wider Islamic historical context, concerns the ritual Friday hutbe. This research was carried out in the Firestone Library at Princeton University, where I was affiliated as visiting fellow to the Near Eastern Studies Department (January-May). The material thus collected constitutes the foundation of the first chapter (after the Introduction) in a scheduled publication (see section 'Kommentarer').

Step 3 (fall 2015): Archive research at ISAM (Islam Araştırmaları Merkezi, Centre for Islamic Research), Istanbul. The focus here was especially on official hutbes, since 1968 fortnightly appearing in Diyanet Gazetesi, a periodical published by the Directorate of Religious Affairs, Diyanet. Longer interviews with theologians, religious administrators, preachers, and various audiences were also conducted.

Step 4 (spring 2016): Intensified research on Diyanet, the institution responsible for the official hutbes, with special emphasis on the change of media approach and discourse occurring during the first decade of the 2000s.

Step 5 and 6 (fall 2016-spring 2017): Writing period, as visiting fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg.

International networks

Except for Bilkent University in Ankara and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, my Turkish and Swedish academic affiliations respectively, I have often been in contact with the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen for individual presentations and seminars. Partly as an outcome of that cooperation, Docent Simon Stjernholm, a faculty of that department, and myself organized a conference with the title "Modern Muslim Homiletics: Ritual, Discourse, and Ideology" (University of Copenhagen, May 10-13, 2018). My own contribution bore the title "Officially Authorized Friday Sermons in a Secular State: Religious Institution-building in Modern Turkey and its Dilemmas." An anthology based on the proceedings of that conference is in the course of preparation. As one of two editors, I am also the co-author of the Introduction and Epilogue of that publication.

During the fall of 2017 I was invited to submit a paper "Nationalism, Secularism and State-Religion Relationships in Turkey and Russia" to a conference entitled "The Political Regimes in Russia and Turkey: A Comparison" (Bonn 24-25 November, 2017) organized by DGO (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde e. V.). The proceedings have been published as Heft 10-12/2018 in Osteuropa (see list of publications). 15-18 November, 2018, I participated in the yearly conference of the North American Middle East Studies Association (MESA), San Antonio, Texas, by submitting a paper related to my on-going research on Turkish Friday sermons, entitled "Turkish secularism in retrospect: a critical appraisal." The MESA conferences are accompanied with a rich book fair, with possibilities to establish connections with suitable publishers. As a result, there are now two publications in preparation: one anthology based on the Copenhagen conference (May 2018) and a monograph based on my own research.

Concerning publications outside of the academia proper I have contributed articles to the Stockholm daily Svenska Dagbladet and a booklet published by Utrikespolitiska Institutet (see list of publications). These contributions are not directly related to the core topic of my research. However, as I am now summing up the results of several years of research, it is my hope that I will be able to share some of them also with the general, non-academic public.